


wake up a stranger to yourself (and then you learn to live with her)

by Veridique



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 2 (Critical Role), Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, I have Thoughts regarding Molly's gender identity, I mean it's not a plot point but still, Nonbinary Mollymauk Tealeaf, title from a Dessa song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 06:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20131105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veridique/pseuds/Veridique
Summary: Nine things about being brought back from the dead





	wake up a stranger to yourself (and then you learn to live with her)

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by [this wonderful Tumblr post](https://hgk477.tumblr.com/post/186538355044/nine-things-about-being-brought-back-from-the-dead) that I saw and immediately went "oh I need to write a Molly fic about that."

_1\. You will be cold._

It's ice in his veins, the first thing he notices. Spots all across his body--his neck, his shoulder, the palm and back of his hand, more spots he hasn't the presence of mind to name--are freezing, but not the way you freeze when you stick your hand in an ice box or stay outside in the snow too long. Freezing from the inside out, the way your throat feels when you swallow an icy drink, fast like a shot, when it's cold in your throat but too far down to choke back up. Your hands grab at your neck to warm it, but your throat won't be soothed. The only thing that keeps you from pouring boiling water down your throat is the image of a chilled glass splitting and shattering when exposed to heat. You fear that your throat might shatter, too.

He fears this, although he doesn't remember ever seeing a glass break. 

He doesn't remember anything before the cold.

_2\. You will wake up screaming. You all do._

He's not screaming from pain--he doesn't remember being in pain, though he remembers its name and face. The cold blood racing through him hurts, but it's not why he's screaming. 

He knows that babies cry when they are born, though he can't remember if he's ever seen a baby born. But he knows that they cry, and that they keep crying and keep crying and crying until one day they are adults and they are not supposed to cry except when someone dies.

He is an adult, he thinks, although he doesn't remember being a child or a teenager or passing the day where he became an adult and stopped crying except when someone dies. 

But someone has died, probably, although he doesn't know who, and so he cries now, and screams and sobs and he would beg if he could but he doesn't 

He can't.

He can't remember how.

_3\. Your entire body will throb. The pain will eventually subside; being brought back is never a painless task._

He kicks and claws as hard as he can, and even though he doesn't remember his strength, he knows he isn't as strong as he should be.

It's the aching of his body, the pain that flares at each joint as he digs his way out of the grave of someone else, a man he can't remember being 

Once he's out, staring at a hole and a mound on either side of it, he expects the pain to ease. Instead, it gets worse. It throbs until he falls to his knees, swaying so much that momentum threatens to pull him back into this newly-redug grave. It's all he can do to resist, because he knows he won't have the strength to climb out again.

The pain steals his thoughts, his words, even his ability to perceive the world outside of himself over the noise of the world inside himself, which is nothing but agony that he can't find words to express.

Eventually he finds his way back to his feet. It's not that the pain subsides; it's more that it hurts worse to kneel than to stand. 

So he stands, and he walks, and months later he wakes one morning and for the first time doesn't feel bruises hiding under his smooth lavender skin.

_4\. Do not get up immediately. You will be nauseous, and your body will need time to readjust to this realm._

It's a few days before he finds another living soul, and more than that before he finds one who won't chase him away. 

He's still not talking much when he meets Gustav, but the circus has taken in more than one lonely wayward child, and if he's a bit bigger and a lot more broken than most scared children, Gustav doesn't seem to mind.

He finds ways to communicate, with Gustav's help. The other members of the caravan learn to ask yes-or-no, this-or-that questions, so he can answer without needing to speak. A pickpocket he meets on the road teaches him a few signs in thieves' cant, and while he doesn't retain more than a phrase or two, he's touched by this perfect stranger helping him for no reason other than kindness.

Gustav's the one who gives him a name, _Mollymauk Tealeaf,_ and those words are the first he can remember ever speaking aloud. He tries the name on his tongue, his new name, not the name of the man who was buried but the name of the stranger who dug his way out.

Mollymauk starts talking after that. It's easier to talk, when you have a name. Easier to separate _I_ and _me_ from _you_ when _I_ isn't just _I,_ it's _Mollymauk_ or sometimes just _Molly,_ when he's among friends.

_Molly._

He doesn't know what the dead man's name is, and he doesn't care to.

_5\. You will not remember how you died. Do not ask._

The first time he nicks himself with a piece of glass, he feels it swell in his hands with a force he can't understand. 

He understands it well enough the next time someone gets a little too close to Toya, understands what he needs to do. His hand clasps around the prop sword he's been juggling, and it's just cheap glass, it shouldn't be able to draw blood but it does, and it frosts over with ice crystals that remind him too much of the feeling of ice in his veins. He brandishes the glass sword as if he knows what to do with it, and the sight of an imposing tiefling with blood-red eyes and an enchanted sword is enough to get the creep to back off.

And Toya is safe. 

And if Molly feels a little weak once the adrenaline has worn off, well, it's a small price to pay for defending his family.

_6\. Ask for more blankets. You will feel very cold._

The circus is a fine family.

But it falls apart, like all families seem wont to do. 

Bedfellows don't get much stranger than these ones he's fallen in with, but they're only as strange as him. A goblin with a drinking problem, a wizard attached to her at the hip, a tiefling with a sweet tooth and a sweeter heart, a monk with an authority problem, and a half-orc who understands his powers about as well as Molly understands his own--in short, a group of people unlikely to ask too many questions about his past.

Add Yasha to the mix and it's a perfect recipe for a home.

Molly's never known _home_ to mean a roof and four walls. The circus never had that, and the Nein never have it for more than a few days at a time. _Home_ is people sharing what they have, no matter how little. _Home_ is trusting untrustworthy people just enough to get by and then a little bit more. 

And it's this kind of home that warms him as the days begin to grow colder, as the cold seeps into his bones in that old familiar way, as if the grave is calling him back.

_7\. Do not ask the practitioner how they performed the ritual. This is considered bad luck, and you will not last long._

From the moment the dark-haired tabaxi calls him "Lucien," he knows the jig is up, or will be soon. 

He plays the game, using his friends' ignorance to gather information from this woman who calls herself Cree, information he doesn't want but knows he needs. He's nothing if not a grifter.

But it's dangerous interacting with her. Even knowing the names that the other man used, _Lucien_ and _Nonagon,_ the words cut like frozen blades into his belly.

When he finally breaks down, under Jester's truth spell, he doesn't understand why some of them can't seem to get it through their heads that he doesn't want to know who Lucien (or Nonagon, or whoever else that man might have been) was. That man met a terrible end, and Molly's just grateful that he survived his own terrible beginning. The only space between where Lucien ended and Mollymauk began is that period of dreamlike memories and repeating a single word like a dull parrot, and Molly has no interest in knowing anything more about the man who put him in that grave.

_8\. Your loved ones will be ecstatic to have you back. Consider this a blessing._

Molly likes being useful.

He likes when his swords can strike down the monsters that the Nein fight. He likes staying up nights on watch, eyes on the horizon as his family sleeps peacefully around him, trusting him to keep them safe. 

He likes being liked, more than he wants to admit.

Even though some of them don't like showing it, he knows they like him. Jester loves everyone, of course. Nott and Caleb take a little time, but eventually he figures them out and they figure him out. Late nights sharing a room with Fjord form a bond between the two outcasts with second lives granted by forces they can't name. Beau fights with him more than the rest of the party combined, but he feels a kinship with her that he can't explain.

One night, as they're up together on watch, he proposes a game of questions. He loses, freeing her from answering, but she answers anyway. That's when he knows.

This is his family.

These are the people he loves.

And he'll die before he'll let anything happen to them.

_9\. Thank the practitioner and let them be on their way. If they do not look you in the eye, consider this a bad omen._

The first eyes he ever looked into were Gustav's. He still remembers them--brown, half obscured by his ashy brown fringe, filled with warmth and softness as he explained the papers he had forged, said the name _Mollymauk Tealeaf,_ the name that turned a walking corpse into a person.

The last eyes he ever looks into are Lorenzo's. They're the same color, but cold and hard. As Lorenzo wipes Molly's bloody spittle off his face and screws his glaive into Molly's chest, everything fades from view except those eyes.

The world goes quiet. He can't hear the horses stomping or Beau screaming or Lorenzo panting hard, as if he's compensating for the breaths Mollymauk will never take.

His hand starts to prickle and burn, both on the palm and the back of the hand. His shoulder is burning, too, now, and his neck. Spots across his body, nine in all, burn red-hot. He would scream and sob and beg, if he remembered how.

His body is so hot now, he wonders for a moment if his friends have cremated him alive.

But only for a moment. After that, he doesn't remember his friends.

He just knows the burning heat.

He'd give anything to be cold once more.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Comments light up my days.


End file.
